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Saturday, February 02, 2008

PB&J for breakfast... but not as a sandwich!

I had peanut butter on my mind when I woke up this morning and since I was itchin' to bake something, I baked up these Peanut Butter and Jelly Muffins to go with breakfast.

We again used our favorite combination of all-purpose flour and whole wheat pastry flour to keep the muffins light, yet give them a little more nutrition - but as always, you could just use all-purpose if needed. With just a half cup of sugar for the recipe, we felt that the muffins were just barely sweet enough - which was actually good for us, however if you like your muffins fairly sweet, I would suggest sprinkling some crunchy raw turbinado sugar before baking on top rather than adding more sugar to the batter.

You have options for the filling - once half of the batter is spooned into the muffin tins, you could add a dollop of strawberry, grape or raspberry jam (or whatever flavor you think would go well with peanut butter). We opted for raspberry simply because we already had half a jar open in the fridge (now if I had an open jar of Nutella it would be another story!). With a filling like this, I wouldn't suggest trying to tell doneness by a toothpick - just lightly press on the center and if the muffin top springs back, they are done!

Even though the muffins have a strong peanut butter aroma, the flavor is actually quite mild. This allowed the hidden raspberry pocket to come through, yet not totally overtake the nutty flavor. I wouldn't call these muffins dense, but with the heavy peanut butter, they are not light as air either - pretty hearty and filling though!

10 comments:

The muffins look good Joe!I made peanut butter muffins a couple weeks ago and my son and husband also liked it a lot. However, whenever I try PB muffins I find them to be a little crumbly (almost on the dry side, although they were kind of moist inside). Was your like that too?We put chocolate chips on ours, ad my son wanted to try that instead of jam, and the flavors were actually quite good together. Just as you mentioned, with a nice pb aroma, but very subtle flavor.Ana

Weird - I made these, too (see post on my blog) last week and did what you did - substituted some of the flour for white whole wheat - and, like Ana, they were dry about 3-4 hours after they'd cooled. Any tips on making them moister?

I made these muffins when I was living in Vancouver. I liked them, but they definitely needed more sugar, and I also used a heaping half cup of PB (which still didn't have enough PB flavor for me). I need to make these again soon because I did like them a lot...just with modifications. My ideal version of these muffins would definitely not be found in CL, though. :)

Hi Joe!I also froze mine right after they were cooled, and even when reheated they were sort of crumbly as we ate them.Both my husband and son really enjoyed the flavors though! But my son commented on the crumbly factor too. The second muffin he had he broke up in a little bowl and added milk to it. It was a "muffin mush", but it turned out reeeeeally yummy!!Ana